Workshop 'The internal and external syntax of adverbial clauses'

The last two decades have seen a renewed interest in adverbial clauses and their syntactic properties, resulting in a mass of new empirical findings. These findings show that adverbial clauses are much more heterogeneous than previously recognized. As for their internal syntax, they differ with respect to the possibility to feature main clause phenomena (e.g. Haegeman 2006, 2010a, Coniglio 2011, Frey 2012) and the obligatory presence of clause internal A`-movement (Geis 1970, Larson 1990). Regarding their external properties, they can occupy various positions within the clause, each option correlating with interpretative differences and possible differences regarding the choice of the complementizer. And some adverbial clauses show signs of a relative clause structure, most prominently temporal clauses (Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2004, Geis 1970) and conditional clauses (Bhatt & Pancheva 2006, Haegeman 2010b). The aim of this workshop is to bring together recent research on the structural properties of adverbial clause and to explore their consequences for the syntax of clauses and sentences in general.

Some adverbial clauses show clear signs for a relative clause structure (Bhatt & Pancheva 2006, Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2004, Geis 1970, Haegeman 2010b). There is also a diachronic relationship between adverbial and relative clauses (Axel-Tober 2012). On the other hand, there also exist adverbial clauses that do not show signs of a relative clause structure (Geis 1970, Larson 1990). The question is therefore how similar adverbial clauses are to each other and what the consequences of these differences are for their structure. Do the differences indicate that there are internal structural differences among the various types of adverbial clauses? Or do these differences result from external properties, such as their integration into the host clause? Moreover, a relative clause analysis has also been proposed for complement clauses (Arsenijevic 2009), in particular for complements to factive predicates (Aboh 2005, Krapova 2010). We would like to investigate the (dis)similarities between adverbial clauses and other clause types with respect to both their internal and external syntax, and whether dependent clauses may be uniformly analyzed as relative clauses (Caponigro & Polinsky 2011).